Benton Sans Wide

Type

Type11:00 amSeptember 18th, 2013

Already a luxurious and gorgeous font, Benton Sans from Font Bureau now has 16 additional weights in the family and they are all wide! Also, should you be in the market for this new release, you can email them and receive 25% off the wide family.

In Font Bureau’s own words:

Benton Sans, already the largest Font Bureau family, now boasts a full spectrum of widths from Extra Compressed to the new Benton Sans Wide. This makes a total of 80 styles — the 5 widths, each with 8 weights and corresponding italics. And that will make designers with complex typographic needs very happy. Combine this group with Benton Sans RE for small screen use, or pair it with Benton Modern as a serif companion, and there isn’t a typographic task too large, too small, or too complex that the comprehensive expanded family can’t handle.

Broad sans serifs are uncommon. The most frequently used wide option in this American Gothic genre is Trade Gothic Extended, but it’s limited to just two weights. One reason for the dearth of sans options with wide proportions is simply that they are quite difficult to draw. Creating an extended member that fits with the rest of a sans family requires a skillful, tasteful hand. Fortunately, we know a guy named Cyrus Highsmith.

Highsmith’s Benton Sans Wide is an alternative to early 20th-century workhorses like Trade (and its forebear News Gothic), offering a more complete palette with a full range of weights, italics, small caps, and figures. The Benton Sans family is also more uniform in design, useful when consistency across weights and widths is more important than individual flavors.